


the wolf blood, the mountain earth

by mimiofthemalfoys



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Childhood Memories, F/M, Modern AU, POV First Person, Post-Canon, Vale AU, in modern au's jon and sansa are not related, post parentage reveal, show verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23876413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimiofthemalfoys/pseuds/mimiofthemalfoys
Summary: more drabbles, for jonsa drabble fest' 20.a little modern au, a little canon verse and the call of northern wolves.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Alayne Stone, Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 21
Kudos: 33
Collections: Jon x Sansa Drabble





	1. rosa suburbia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> day 1: prompt- linger  
>   
> sansa's world is glossy pink. jon wishes she'd let him nurse his heartbreak in peace. he also wishes she'd let him stay. modern au. jon is about 25, sansa 22.

“Can I work here for a bit? Robb’s so bloody loud I can’t hear myself.”

A listless shrug. “Sure.”

“Thanks. I’ll be quiet.”

She nods, and says it again, _sure_ , her _r_ s clipped off like dead lobelias to make space for drags. Sometimes he wonders what Sansa dreams about when she’s perched this way- looking out a window with the secrecy of a sniper at a periscope, cigarette dangling from the left corner of her mouth. It’s how Jon finds her every morning on his way downstairs, seeking six o’clock supplies ( _hard-to-ration things:_ _dental floss, Xeroxes, coffee, mental peace_ ). A ritual viewing to keep balance: Sansa Stark in her too-pink bedroom wearing too-pink lingerie staring at too-pink sunsets, although on retrospection, sunsets here are never quite as brilliant as his _idea_ of them.

Most things aren’t.

Outside, it’s summer. In the canon of atmospheric literature, there is something artificial about the way summer is described. _Sunshine and great bursts of leaves. Air that smells of crushed fern._ Summer in the foothills isn’t half as proprietary; it arrives in silence and gets into crevices like beach glass and thoughtless exchanges made in the heat of a single moment. The air, in fact, hadn’t smelt like crushed fern when Val had slammed the door upon his face in a hot blaze of tears and told him he had developed a pathological affinity for self-centeredness. It had smelt like the wine they’d drunk before.

That was two months back. Jon Snow lost two months to an error of judgement, though some of it was probably the wine too.

Anyway. _Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien_.

 _Thump, thump, thump._ Insane acoustics. When Jon is sad, he drinks a lot and rhapsodizes on the lines of Richard Siken _._ When Robb is sad, he plays Post Malone. From the looks of it, Jon’s roommate must be fucking _devastated_ today, but one can only endure _Rockstar_ so many times before one feels a burgeoning need to pop in half a Percocet and seek refuge in the room of a greater, more tranquil being for the first time in forty days.

 _Thump_.

 _Or, maybe he’s beating shit up?_ The Stark kids are a weird lot, Jon has come to realise from his time playing hanger-on: they keep to themselves and operate strictly on an eat-or-be-eaten policy, running on cool crisp cocktails of narcotics and self-hatred. Combinations vary: Arya punches jocks; Bran plays Ted Bundy podcasts during morning yoga sessions. Etcetera.

“What are you writing?”

Nothing to be exact, not since he got distracted from self-pity an odd minute back. More of guilt than anything else, Jon puts his laptop aside. “Nada.”

“You working on that novel?”

“Trying.”

“Feel you.” She taps on a fissure in the cool granite of the sill. “When Harry dumped me, I locked myself into a room and watched Elizabeth Taylor movies for 72 hours. Naked.”

“Sounds terrific.”

“The binging or the nudity?”

“Both. Invite me next time.”

“Alrighty!” this in a sing-song lilt, like playing Harley Quinn. “Bring your best Arbor Red and we’ll watch _Gone with the Wind_.”

“Don’t forget the other half of the pact.”

Sansa pulls a silly face, and he thinks, Percocet-hazed, _funny girl_. Conversations should’ve been initiated before, but she wasn’t, well, Val. _Embarrassing_.

“Here, have a whole drag. Cleanses your mind.” She proffers the cig at him, rolling-paper stained by a very bright, very bubblegum-pink lipgloss. Jon manages to complicatedly maneuver accepting the cigarette without making contact with Sansa’s fingers, a feat he’d thought impossible for any human in hypothetical pick-me-ups.

Not that he _minds_. Not that he’s-

“Close the laptop darling, if the angst doesn’t come in fifteen minutes it sure wouldn’t materialize in twenty.”

Not used to being told off by anyone in a camisole, Jon does, indeed, close his laptop. It’s a very becoming camisole, objectively. In fact all of Sansa’s room has the strange congruity of an organized film set, there’s clutter, but it’s organic, prettily messy, an 80’s pinup-girl-dorm with the mandatory young Leo poster behind the door. The one in the floral shirt.

Jon looks at her again. Funny girl, yes, but also quite _lovely_ , objectively, with that shock of red hair falling all over her face and big blue eyes with liquid flourishes at the creases that probably have a cosmetological name Jon doesn’t know. He watches her reapply her lipgloss in the dresser mirror. That particular pink would look atrocious anywhere else but somehow it looks just correct on her mouth. _Glossology-_ proclaims the tube in bright gaudy silver letters. _Shade 245: Rosa Suburbia_. Christ above.

His phone buzzes. _Val_ , says the ID, with the two blue hearts she’d added the day they’d swapped contacts. Jon hesitates, delaying the imminent. Lingering. _Just another five seconds._

Mirror Sansa looks at him and flashes a dazzling smile. He smiles back only to realise she’s checking her makeup. Bit of an idiot move, classic Jon.

Another buzz.

“You better get that, Johnny,” Sansa chimes in her Harley Quinn voice.

Summer is untyped sentences waiting to be born, a room plastered by _Vogue_ cutouts, a bed strewn with nail polish bottles, lacy underthings and empty boxes of dessert crumbs. Summer is ugly pink lipgloss and ridiculously lovely blue eyes and the epiphany that _Gone with the Wind_ is _that_ movie you’ve been planning to watch your whole life but simply never got around to.

“It’s probably dad, checking in. I’ll call him later. Listen, you want to go out on the terrace or something? It’s too smoky in here.”

“Shit, you just asked me on a date to my own rooftop?”

“Wait, what?”

She laughs.

The glow on Jon’s phone screen informs he has three missed calls. They can wait.

Being with Sansa is good. Being with Sansa works a bit like holding a red hot iron tong to an open flesh-wound. It’s overwhelming, and sometimes the bite in her words is hostile, but it heals. It cleans. If it were upto him, he would be cauterized by Sansa Stark every time the Percocet didn’t dissolve.

Outside, the summer too, lingers.

Inside, the room is thick with nicotine and Rosa Suburbia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'tis a mess i know, leave me alone, i'm going through stuff  
> (also post malone and val stans im so sorry this crusty ugly snitch would write something like that)


	2. perjury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> homecoming is a bitter word, strung on a leash like a tamed wolf.  
> or, the lady of winterfell realises she's not ready to meet them in the open- the new faces, and the old one too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> day 2: prompt- stolen  
> canon show verse. takes place just before the stark reunion in season 8 episode 1.

“They are here, your grace. Targaryen banners fly over Wintertown.”

Sansa listens. Half a mind to him, half a mind to parchment slicing open in the melting wick of a candle. She listens but she doesn’t understand.

“Your cousin the King rides at the head of the retinue,” Lord Royce hesitates. His voice has the abrasive resonance of etchings on bark. “The dragon queen is at his side.”

She watches the two halves of the letter fall apart, a butterfly slashed down the middle. Ink dissolving in dark, lacey runes.

“We shall be ready at the North Gate. Inform my brother and sister.”

He nods, shuffles away, relieved of the sordid half of his duty. The bearer of bad news carries it like poison.

But the letter, the letter.

She knows it by heart. She has committed it to memory. She carries it around, her own cup of poison drunk so deep her blood _sings_ for it.

_And if we survive this war, I have pledged our forces to Daenerys as the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms._

_Our_ forces, _our_ land, _our_ blood _._ _I_ have pledged, _I_ have decided, _I_ am King.

Sansa doesn’t know if she should laugh or weep.

* * *

She brushes her hair, braiding in and out- a mass of it, knotted fat like blood on her crown. It is red alright, red as the skin of a Tully trout, but when she lets it fall to her waist, her hair looks severe, austere, akin to a warrior, and there’s the north in her. Times call for armour, even if you haven’t wielded a knife or ridden a giant beast to battle. _Especially_ if.

Dragonglass. Simple, necessary ammunition. Slabs of black stone to fashion into blades and swords. Instead Jon returns, ( _home:_ or wherever it is Winterfell now stands in the scheme of things) with a Targaryen army and a pair of monsters.

It’s the edge in her.

The threat of war. It’s the feeling of drawing the winning hand, but losing the game anyway. No, it’s this- she’s won, _they’ve_ won, only to be robbed in a lane and left penniless, with a blow to the ribs for good measure.

_What did she tell you? Was her armour made of dragon-scales and her hair shot with moonglow?_

_Was it a moment of weakness that befell you, or was it a spell of strength?_

_Which was it, Jon?_

Unbecoming. To be Lady of Winterfell, and to have a heart veined in ice.

It’s this - Daenerys Targaryen has stolen from her- her home, her people, the old gods her family bled for. It’s this - they’d stood on the battlements together, she and Jon, and they’d watched the Bolton banners crumple and fall like trodden leaves. The direwolf sigil had flown down the drawn bridge and snow had fallen, just the first, light traces of it, a delicate frosting, like a ritual bath- and Jon had kissed her forehead, and it was, it was unbearably _sweet_ , like a silver song, like a single blue rose coiled round the wrist of a knight. Soft and fleeting and ephemeral.

It’s this- in yielding Winterfell to Daenerys, Jon has let _himself_ be stolen.

Sometimes she is all wolf. She’ll rip to shreds with claw and teeth before they claim her stakes.

* * *

There’s a dream she’s nursed like a secret these past few nights but it’s not for her to lay bare to the world.

He doesn’t meet her gaze. Homecoming is a bitter word, strung on a leash like a tamed wolf.

When Jon, beloved, wretched, upright traitor Jon ( _trader of honour, stealer of sickle-shaped half-kisses_ ) embraces her, she clings to him greedily. Aware of violet eyes on the horizon, a silvery sylph of a silhouette.

She is ready now.

_The north is as beautiful as your brother claimed it would be. As are you._

Words fall, honeyed by practice, from Daenerys’ mouth.

Sansa looks at Jon again, and this time, he looks back. 

She polishes her dream like a jewel, hoards it in her heart for nobody to claim. It will damn her eventually, but that’s for later.

“Winterfell is yours, your Grace,” she lies.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mostly gave up on this one. *shrug emoji*


	3. wild gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jon thinks in flowers and songs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> day 3: prompt- legends

They are children.

Edge of the woods, dirt on their knees. Stumbling across shallow streams, air thick with the ripe smell of crushed silver fern, pebbles and flowers falling out of pockets. Small against the giant trees, warm against the cold hills.

Arya has a sword. She calls it Symeon, for the knight in the song, the knight who pressed sapphires into the hollows of his eyeless skull. Robb has a crown fashioned from hawthorn. It sits jaunty on his shock of hair.

They barter and they truce. _If you pick Florian for the first fight, I shall be Ryam in the next._ It’s all fair: Robb outdoes Jon with his sudden brutish tackling, Jon bests Robb in stealth.

“Can I be Visenya?” Arya asks.

“Girls shouldn’t fight.”

“ _Girls shouldn’t_ \- seven hells, do you fear losing?!” She flies at Robb, waving her painted wooden blade with such aplomb, even the strongest Valyrian steel should ring hollow by comparison.

Battles ensue. Winner gets the lion’s share of river pebbles, the best ones with the shiny glass edges. Loser gets a beating. And so on. Their play has an edge to it. A northern edge. Wild, like wolves on the hunt.

Through all of this, Sansa sits apart, nose scrunched in distaste. She runs with them, as of the same pack of pups, but she keeps a distance when the day’s game turns messy, when they pretend at violence. It’s the riverine blood in her. She’s more trout than any of them. More Lady Catelyn’s child, less Lord Stark’s.

They draw lots and Jon wins. This means he gets to play Prince Aemon till the sun goes down on the sorrel grove. Robb seethes in envy. Everybody wants to be the Dragon Knight.

“You have to have a Lady Naerys. And you must wear her favour and ride to battle honorably.”

“Aemon and Naerys are old gossip yarn.”

“Aemon and Naerys are legendary,” Sansa pips in, for she takes offence, his whimsical half-sister, in all matters of song and speech. “They loved each other.”

“Sansa”- Arya slashes through the air with her dummy sword- “why don’t you play Naerys and let him wear a favour?”

“Yes, Sansa, why don’t you?” Jon asks, suddenly feeling petulant. “since you care so for _legends_?”

She bristles and for a moment he fears she’ll run crying to her lady mother. That would be the end to their games! But then she rises from her place on the heath and approaches him, distaste thudding off every step she takes.

Sansa is the fairest of them all. She is light and fluttering and lovely, with a name like a piece of music and eyes like baby frostfires. Jon thinks of Symeon again and, looking at Sansa, he wonders if she might press the blood of autumn to her head if enemies should try to steal all her beautiful hair.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking so. You can dislike a thing and still find it beautiful. Only a fool would not heed Sansa with wonder.

Today she wears a crown of gold yarrow on her head, gold to go with her yellow dress, and it’s this crown she plucks a sprig from, fastening it to Jon’s hand with a bit of ribbon.

“There.”

Jon doesn’t know what to say, so he settles for a funny half-bow. She’s already turned away, uninterested, entirely absorbed in wreathing a chain of primroses. What can one say anyway? _Thank you for the yarrow. Thank you for the disdain._

So, he returns to the game. Wondering, against his will, if it would kill her to be nice to him. Just once.

* * *

They are grown.

Winterfell is smoke and ash, stone and the delicate edge of hope laced in apprehension. In places, the Bolton banners are yet to be ripped off their encroached bits of space.

 _I’m not a Stark,_ he protests.

_You are to me._

In some ways, perhaps Sansa is being honest, not just kind (kind- she is kind- and she is other things too, the girl who’d woven wildflowers and sung songs about maidens in love). But these days, Jon feels more Aemon than he ever did. Bearing his scars. Cheating death. Riding to battle wearing his honour like a helm.

And what does that make Sansa?

He daren’t ask. He daren’t know.

* * *

They are children again.

Arya scoops frogspawn from the pool and flings it at Sansa. Sansa screams, shielding herself with her tiny arms, half in tears. Robb laughs so hard he gets the hiccups.

Jon sits apart, no longer a knight, just himself. Just Jon Snow.

They are done for the day. Done with stories, for reality awaits (and how it shall loom in the days to come!)

 _Future_ is a big word, potent with danger.

For now, the yarrow rests fresh against his wrist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all over the place, but if you know me you know that i adore writing jonsa with floral/spring themes


	4. frostfire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> of knife-hilt secrets. of things best left unsaid.  
> of fire and ice, of ice and fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> day 4: prompt- hidden/true  
> jon and alayne at the eyrie. vale au. post parentage reveal.

Alayne builds a castle.

Cups fresh powdery snow into her hand. Fashions it into little turrets and towers, eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

She looks up once to smile at Jon.

 _It’s meant to be the Eyrie,_ she mouths.

Her smile burns on his skin like bottled wildfire.

It’s just the two of them in the godswood, shrouded by the indigo haze of mountain dusk.

No birds, no men. Just them.

Him and her. Jon and Alayne. _Alayne Stone_ , for that’s the name he must call Sansa, even together, even apart. Alayne with the darkly glossed chestnut of her braid, Alayne with the pinpricks of apple-red on her cheeks. Alayne in her silvery dress, fluttering like a bird around the Crescent Chamber, weakening Jon’s heart.

He had never learnt to live with honour. In the beginning, shame had flooded his blood, numbing him like mulled wine. But underneath the shame, a pinprick of defiance.

Now, now it’s too late for all that.

She pauses to catch her breath. Starlight in her hair. _If he should find us, I won’t hear the end of it!_

It’s late after all.

The Vale rests, dormant, an unclean bruise swelling in the cold. Jon however is alive, alert. The letter he carries like a knife threatens to scorch through his bearings, threatens to set his vows aflame.

Certain things appear more stilted when put into perspective.

_Sharper._

He’d left the rookery after soliciting a half-hour of privacy in exchange for a fistful of silver stags and a deliberate demonstration of Longclaw’s edge to the Maester. Threats are necessary; Baelish has his songbirds stationed in every harmless-looking alcove of the Eyrie, and the letter- nestled safely within his cloak-felt like a liability to Jon.

Upon reaching his chambers, he’d dismissed his attendants, feigning a black temper, and they’d trailed away in a swish of azure-and-bronze gossamer. One could always play at temperamental lordship, but one couldn’t come undone before half a dozen pages and stewards.

One simply couldn’t afford to.

Alayne twists her braid. Her palms are red.

Jon watches her work and remarks at the flush of her cheeks.

His surety had kept him tethered to the ground. To be son to a man with a spine fashioned from Valyrian steel, to be brother to a fierce young king, surely that should count for something, even if his mother were to remain nameless. But this. _This._

Slowly, the first threads of panic had unspooled in his head. He’d thought of every way Samwell’s missive could tear down all of Westeros to naked bone. 

Thought of the grim irony, of being born to a woman made of hewn stone and a man with about as much honour as the lowest cutthroat in Flea Bottom.

A bastard twice over.

It took an hour for the fear to conceal in Jon’s blood.

Then the realisation set in.

Of course. Of _course._

It’s quiet now.

Earlier, in the grey hours of the morning, it had snowed, and it will snow again, if the overcast skies hold steady. It’s fall, the godswood is cold as doom and the sun has probably set, though all colours wash out against the gleaming towers. This part of the castle ground is vacant, no clangor of dinner bells, no handmaids rushing about with bowls of steaming water, even the gorge of Alyssa’s Tears reaches him muffled and considerably diminished by thick foliage.

Alayne in the snow, singing a song about a roadside rose. Frostfires piled in the folds of her skirts, woven into her hair. Maddeningly lovely.

In that moment, she is as near to Jon as she is far. Two feet and half a hundred leagues’ worth of words he must traverse.

The shape of the parchment in his cloak, sharp as a knife-hilt. Dark words.

 _Nothing has to change_ , he reasons. He can ask Samwell to bury it away, keep up his mummer’s farce of playing Stark.

But then Alayne brings up a fistful of snow and pelts it at him, laughing in her silvery way, and goddamn it, maybe he does want _some_ things to change.

Maybe the truth might not swallow him whole after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a really bad day while writing this, so i'm sorry if it is poorly constructed or confusing.


	5. give me hope in silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sansa writes a letter with a dream of spring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> day 5: prompt- the wall  
> canon show verse. takes place indefinitely before the last sequence of s8.

Jon.

You should be sleeping now. You must, for it’s the hour of the night when none but the old gods of the forest keep wake. It’s such a dark, craven sort of time, I fear even the stars have taken to their beds.

If our men kept to the kingsroad, then on the turn of this moon you should have been at Castle Black for three weeks. In all fairness, I wouldn’t know. The snows might be deeper. Perhaps smoke rising from an inn has made you tarry at Mole’s Town. I wonder, does that little tavern still stand? The one where we broke our fasts, the morning we rode to Karhold? Do you remember Jon? The little one with the thatched roof and the garden of wild strawberries, and our meal there- the broth that came hot, with meat and lemon in steaming bowls. I remember you asking, in your jesting way, _how ever did these moles get their hands on Dornish lemons?_ -and I remember thinking, _war is near_.

But oh, our meal was hot in our hands, and we were two of a pack. We’d willed our fates to reunite.

I daren’t climb to the battlements now. The dark doesn’t scare me, not anymore; it’s the distance that takes my breath away. If I close my eyes, I see us all, scattered like shards off a sept glass, Bran there in the unfamiliar south, (our little brother, crowned with gold and incense! Could you imagine the look on Old Nan’s face?) Arya off sailing to the edge of the world, free as the bird I couldn’t be, myself, here in this echoing counterfeit of a home and you, travelling to the wall, the steps swelling to leagues with every expanse of ice, every wood we couldn’t put a name to if we tried.

Yet here I am anyway, willing my words to make a semblance of sense. What a laugh it would be, if I should send a raven your way, and you should find it in the blink of an eye!

When spring comes, we sit for our third and final council. I have heard them speak in hallways. I have heard their whispers, and I know what they wish. They wish to make me queen, Jon, the Queen in the North.

  
Jon.

There was a minstrel here last night. He had a voice like a stream and he sang of Bael. Have you heard his song? He was the king beyond-the-wall. You see, Bael asked a favour of Lord Brandon Stark- in return for his lovely songs, he demanded the fairest flower blooming in the bowers of Winterfell. Lord Stark appeased him with a northern rose, for a wilderness of them had just blossomed. (Funny how a song and a flower can fan the flames of more battles than the gods ordained!)

But. Bael never accepted his gift. Come next morn, he’d flown away, and he’d stolen the bride of winter, Lord Stark’s daughter. He made a fool of our forefathers.

That’s a merry end to a sprightly tale!, you’d think. Listen: the story doesn’t stop here. Lord Stark found his daughter a long while later, with a child of her own. They had never left Winterfell. They had hidden in the crypts.

There’s more; the matter bleeds to a dreary finish. But that’s not important. I forget myself.

Do you hear me? You are further North, keeping your vows-but your enemies are dead, fire and ice, knife to the core. I won’t let you be alone. The north remembers, it remembers how we were stripped to flesh and bone, and yet we fought, we killed Ramsay Bolton and Petyr Baelish and Daenerys Targaryen, and we’ll do it again, a thousand-fold to keep our home safe, that’s what the Starks do, and you, you are a Stark till the gods themselves lose faith. The crown is mine, this land is salted by our bloodline and the trees run red standing vigil. Before spring comes I’ll find you and make you King and together we’ll rebuild Winterfell with the triumph of victors and laughter shall sound from the hallways again.

I won’t let you live out beyond the wall, Jon. I’ll be your Bael, and steal you away and hide you in the crypts and round the bedsides of our enemies I will leave fragrant winter roses and shackles cut with my own teeth, but I will have you back.

I will repay my debt. I will keep my word.

This time, I will save you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
> title is from "the enemy" by mumford and sons :)


	6. magnum opus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s kind of like holding a real ruby to a sea of paste-stones: the counterfeits show themselves.  
> or jon tries to paint a panorama but sansa gets in the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> day 6: prompt- autumn  
> this is just walmart belles-lettres :)

Richmond Hill spills like silk upon Jon’s canvasses.

Twenty years spent in London. Ten years in studying nuances.

 _Promenade, with lighter greys. Downward slope to the south, yellow undertones. Then, the expanse of pure, unblemished green._ _Use chartreuse, add texture with ascent_.

It’s whimsical- Jon often thinks- idiotic, a bit like that O. Henry story, the one about old Behrman and the shedding tree.

But he’s an artist too- very pretentious by the way, that word _artist_ , _painter_ is more like it or even _dauber_. And much like Johnsy, he too hones a dream- one magnum opus, one work to cause a stir, create a legacy; albeit for economic and logistical difficulties he can’t afford to paint the Bay of Naples, so this west London view must suffice for now.

Not bad, the view.

He’s known Richmond through the full cycle of seasons. In spring, the grass is coloured like a parrot’s wing. Tourists bring picnic hampers to the park and couples click saccharine photographs by clusters of wildflowers. In summer, a horde of college kids cycle round the Deer Park circuit and ice cream trucks do brisk business. In winter, the meadows are blanketed in snow and the Thames morphs into a solid sheet the colour of gunmetal. Jon keeps the palettes distinct to each season: pure whites and blues for the colder months, baby pinks and greens for spring, bright jewel tones for the summer.

But it’s autumn now, and autumn means red. Jon has always loved this time of the year best- when the air is crisp, just slightly icy, and he walks home with shoes splattered in a gold-orange mush of wet leaves. It also looks the prettiest, from an aesthete’s perspective- all those burning colours, all that finery.

If you can get it down, autumn on paper is spectacular.

Today, however, he’s got a problem.

There’s a girl before him, a girl in a ridiculous vintage floral dress, the kind worn by Sofia Coppola heroines, accompanied by a fluffy dog on a beaded leash. She’s got very long lashes- the girl, not the dog- and very big blue eyes. Her crowning glory, though, is neither her Sofia Coppola dress nor her blue eyes, but the absolute _mane_ of hair that dances round her head like it’s sentient. Windswept, vibrant, and absolutely red.

A red so vivid it washes out the autumn, neutralizes the fire in the trees, in the little swatches on Jon’s palette. Three coats of fresh paint have been unsuccessful; she’s still sharper, clearer, her red frustratingly more defined. It’s kind of like holding a real ruby to a sea of paste-stones: the counterfeits show themselves.

For the past twenty minutes Sofia Coppola girl’s been trying unsuccessfully to pull off a headstand. Jon feels second-hand embarrassment. _Outdone by a somersaulting girl with crazy hair_.

“Miss, could you mind moving a bit to your left?” _Honesty must count for something_.

She looks curiously at him, upside-down. “Why?”

“I’m making a painting.”

“I can see that.”

“Well, I need-” he theatrically sweeps his arm at nothing in particular- “the view.”

“Rude.”

“I’m sorry.” In retrospection Jon feels he should add a conciliatory note- _I only paint landscapes, miss!_ \- but wisely desists.

“You know, I got this comeback, but it came too late. I wanted to say, I _am_ the view.”

He laughs. She’s not entirely wrong. “I am Jon.”

“Hello, Jon. You shouldn’t restrict yourself. I’ve always wanted to be one of those anonymous subjects you see in old pieces, the ones with the original names. Like, _Girl with a Basket and Three Sons_. You know.”

“Speaking of which, what _is_ your name?”

“I’ll tell you if you include me The View.”

In such cases, it’s best to accept one’s been outmaneuvered.

* * *

Jon paints autumn and he paints her too, exactly as she is, with her sandals in the air. And then, to please her, he scribbles a footnote in pencil: _Girl Doing a Headstand, Supervised by Dog_. It’s an amateurish thing, certainly not his best work. But when he offers her a peek and dimples appear on her cheeks, he feels, well, _accomplished_. So much for professionalism.

“I’m Sansa. But don’t name me if you put that up in a gallery.”

“Deal.”

They shake hands on it. And as Jon watches her plummet again, he thinks, _every great artist needs a great muse_. Even if she cartwheels.

Not bad, the view. Not bad at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> but wow what a fic in my writing career. a fic i'd most like to forget.


End file.
